But I am looking for Winter and the print of its footsteps. Where is it
hiding? It should be here; and how dares this feast of roses and
anemones, of soft air and dew, of bees and birds display itself with
such assurance during the most pitiless month of Winter's reign? And
what will Spring do, what will Spring say, since all seems done, since
all seems said? Is it superfluous, then, and does nothing await it? No;
search carefully: you shall find amid this life of unwearying youth the
work of its hand, the perfume of its breath which is younger than life.
Thus, there are foreign trees yonder, taciturn guests, like poor
relations in ragged clothes. They come from very far, from the land of
fog and frost and wind. They are aliens, sullen and distrustful. They
have not yet learned the limpid speed, not adopted the delightful
customs of the azure. They refused to believe in the promises of the sky
and suspected the caresses of the sun which, from early dawn, covers
them with a mantle of silkier and warmer rays than that with which July
loaded their shoulders in the precarious summers of their native land.
It made no difference: at the given hour, when snow was falling a
thousand miles away, their trunks shivered, and, despite the bold
averment of the grass and a hundred thousand flowers, despite the
impertinence of the roses that climb up to them to bear witness to life,
they stripped themselves for their winter sleep. Sombre and grim and
bare as the dead, they await the Spring that bursts forth around them;
and, by a strange and excessive reaction, they wait for it longer than
under the harsh, gloomy sky of Paris, for it is said that in Paris the
buds are already beginning to shoot. One catches glimpses of them here
and there amid the holiday throng whose motionless dances enchant the
hills. They are not many and they conceal themselves: they are gnarled
oaks, beeches, planes; and even the vine, which one would have thought
better-mannered, more docile and well-informed, remains incredulous.
There they stand, black and gaunt, like sick people on an Easter Sunday
in the church-porch made transparent by the splendour of the sun. They
have been there for years and some of them, perhaps, for two or three
centuries; but they have the terror of winter in their marrow. They will
never lose the habit of death. They have too much experience, they are
too old to forget and too old to learn. Their hardened reason refuses to
admit the light when it does not come at the accustomed time. They are
rugged old men, too wise to enjoy unforeseen pleasures. They are wrong.
For here, around the old, around the grudging ancestors, is a whole
world of plants that know nothing of the future, but give themselves to
it. They live but for a season; they have no past and no traditions and
they know nothing, except that the hour is fair and that they must enjoy
it. While their elders, their masters and their gods, sulk and waste
their time, they burst into flower; they love and they beget. They are
the humble flowers of dear solitude: the Easter daisy that covers the
sward with its frank and methodical neatness; the borage bluer than the
bluest sky; the anemone, scarlet or dyed in aniline; the virgin
primrose; the arborescent mallow; the bell-flower, shaking its bells
that no one hears; the rosemary that looks like a little country maid;
and the heavy thyme that thrusts its grey head between the broken
stones.
But, above all, this is the incomparable hour, the diaphanous and liquid
hour of the wood-violet. Its proverbial humility becomes usurping and
almost intolerant. It no longer cowers timidly among the leaves: it
hustles the grass, overtowers it, blots it out, forces its colours upon
it, fills it with its breath. Its unnumbered smiles cover the terraces
of olives and vines, the tracks of the ravines, the bend of the valleys
with a net of sweet and innocent gaiety; its perfume, fresh and pure as
the soul of the mountain spring, makes the air more translucent, the
silence more limpid and is, in very deed, as a forgotten legend tells
us, the breath of Earth, all bathed in dew, when, a virgin yet, she
wakes in the sun and yields herself wholly in the first kiss of early
dawn.
V
Again, in the little gardens that surround the cottages, the bright
little houses with their Italian roofs, the good vegetables,
unprejudiced and unpretentious, have known no fear. While the old
peasant, who has come to resemble the trees he cultivates, digs the
earth around the olives, the spinach assumes a lofty bearing, hastens to
grow green nor takes the smallest precaution; the garden bean opens its
eyes of jet in its pale leaves and sees the night fall unmoved; the
fickle peas shoot and lengthen out, covered with motionless and
tenacious butterflies, as though June had entered the farm-gate; the
carrot blushes as it faces the light; the ingenuous strawberry-plants
inhale the flavours which noontide lavishes upon them as it bends
towards earth its sapphire urns; the lettuce exerts itself to achieve a
heart of gold wherein to lock the dews of morning and night.
The fruit-trees alone have long reflected: the example of the vegetables
among which they live urged them to join in the general rejoicing, but
the rigid attitude of their elders from the North, of the grandparents
born in the great dark forests, preached prudence to them. But now they
awaken: they too can resist no longer and at last make up their minds to
join the dance of perfumes and of love. The peach-trees are now no more
than a rosy miracle, like the softness of a child's skin turned into
azure vapour by the breath of dawn. The pear and plum and apple and
almond-trees make dazzling efforts in drunken rivalry; and the pale
hazel-trees, like Venetian chandeliers, resplendent with a cascade of
gems, stand here and there to light the feast. As for the luxurious
flowers that seem to possess no other object than themselves, they have
long abandoned the endeavour to solve the mystery of this boundless
summer. They no longer score the seasons, no longer count the days, and,
knowing not what to do in the glowing disarray of hours that have no
shadow, dreading lest they should be deceived and lose a single second
that might be fair, they have resolved to bloom without respite from
January to December. Nature approves them and, to reward their trust in
happiness, their generous beauty and amorous excesses, grants them a
force, a brilliancy and perfumes which she never gives to those which
hang back and show a fear of life.
All this, among other truths, was proclaimed by the little house that I
saw to-day on the side of a hill all deluged in roses, carnations,
wall-flowers, heliotrope and mignonette, so as to suggest the source,
choked and overflowing with flowers, whence Spring was preparing to pour
down upon us; while, upon the stone threshold of the closed door,
pumpkins, lemons, oranges, limes and Turkey figs slumbered in the
majestic, deserted, monotonous silence of a perfect day.